Magento PHP Developer's Guide - Second Edition

Factory names and functions

Magento makes use of factory methods to instantiate models, helpers, and block classes. A factory method is a design pattern that allows us to instantiate an object without using the exact class name and using a class alias instead.

Magento implements the following factory methods:

• Mage::getModel()
• Mage::getResourceModel()
• Mage::helper()
• Mage::getSingleton()
• Mage::getResourceSingleton()
• Mage::getResourceHelper()

Each of these methods takes a class alias that is used to determine the real class name of the object that we are trying to instantiate. For example, if we want to instantiate a product object, we can do so by calling the getModel() method:

$product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product'); 

Notice that we are passing a factory ...